Mower Seat Manipulator

In 2009, Unidex was tasked by a major lawn mower manufacturer to come up with a manipulator to remove heavy seats from their boxes and to set them on an assembly cart. The challenge was to remove six different seats in reusable boxes and to remove them from their boxes with your visual look inside the box being impaired. This project required the seat to be lifted out of the box and then rotate them. This required three different types of interfaced tooling.

Our first approach looked like it would work so seats from the manufacturer were requested, in their appropriate boxes, for proper testing. Soon after the boxes arrived, it was apparent the first design would struggle to get them out of their dunnage. These boxes are cardboard and are turned around several times and take a beating. So back to the drawing board we went to develop a more simple idea to work around the poor box conditions. This time we were much more successful and after several videos going back and forth, we were finally able to ship them their new manipulator.

Shown below (in order) are the 1st version, 2nd version and the final version of the end tooling.